New Releases
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April 9, 2021Laurie Anderson’s 1982 debut album, Big Science, returns to vinyl for the first time in thirty years with this new red vinyl edition, which includes the original album re-mastered for a 25th anniversary CD release in 2007. Big Science foresaw the future, mixing performance art, pop, and electronics, most hauntingly on the hit single, “O Superman.” “Her work,” notes the New York Times, “is unlike anything else in music.”
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Devendra Banhart's cover of The Grateful Dead’s “Franklin’s Tower,” was released in honor of the 45th anniversary of The Grateful Dead’s album Blues for Allah. The song was produced and mixed by Noah Georgeson and recorded with his current touring band: Nicole Lawrence on guitar, Jeremy Harris on synths, and Gregory Rogove on drums and percussion. It was recorded remotely in various studios and home studios around Los Angeles and Stinson Beach, CA.
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This is the first-ever vinyl release of k.d. lang's 2008 Nonesuch album, Watershed, declared "a masterpiece" by the Times. As the title suggests, Watershed represented a milestone in lang’s career. For the first time, she assumed the role of producer, as well as writer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist. “Watershed is like a culmination of everything I’ve done," lang said; "there’s a little bit of jazz, a little country, a little of the Ingénue sound, a little Brazilian touch. It really feels like the way I hear music, this mash-up of genres, and I think it reflects all the styles that have preceded this in my catalogue. I didn’t feel the need to be genre-specific because this experience felt so wide open."
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For his 2020 album with Exploding Star Orchestra, Dimensional Stardust (International Anthem / Nonesuch Records), multidisciplinary artist Rob Mazurek arranged his pieces for eleven musicians, including Jeff Parker, and commissioned his long-time lyrics collaborator Damon Locks to draft original texts for the songs. The album recalls an array of Mazurek’s symphonic influences, from Béla Bartók to Morton Feldman to Gil Evans to Sun Ra to Pedro Santos to Bill Dixon to The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Opting to focus on tight ensemble orchestration over passages of open improvisation, he distills an orchestra of explosive improvisers into a graceful group exercise in melodic minimalism.
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The soundtrack to Tim Burton's film of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, first released on Nonesuch Records in 2007, is available here in its first-ever vinyl edition, a two-LP set. The film, which won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, is an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Tony Award–winning musical, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and the late Alan Rickman. "Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme—I am tempted to say evil—genius," exclaimed the New York Times' A.O. Scott. "This Sweeney is a bloody wonder," raved Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, "intimate and epic, horrific and heart-rending as it flies on the wings of Sondheim's most thunderously exciting score."
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Tristan Perich's Drift Multiply (New Amsterdam / Nonesuch Records), for 50 violins and 50-channel 1-bit electronics, the composer's largest work to date, is conducted by Douglas Perkins. Scored as one hundred individual lines of music, the piece blends violins and speakers into a cascading tapestry of tone, harmony, and noise. The violins perform from sheet music, while the speakers are each connected to custom-built circuit boards programmed to output 1-bit audio, the most basic digital waveforms made of just ones and zeroes.
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Mountain Man performs the English folk song "Greensleeves," as part of its Mountain Man Sings series of cover singles. "'Greensleeves' is one of our favorite winter songs," says the trio. "It occupies a strange melodic balance point between crystalline winter whimsy and the kind of grim determination required to embark into the emotional wilds of the holiday season."
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Chris Thile updates his song "Thank You, New York," featuring Gaby Moreno, for 2020. The original version was featured on Thile's 2017 album, Thanks for Listening. "Right now, with how easy it is to be the talker on social media, how hard it is to maintain focus or give something enough attention to appreciate it, we're in a place where listening is a precious commodity," Thile said. The songs are "a celebration of people who haven't switched off, despite being given every reason to do so."
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On Sam Amidon's self-titled album, which he produced and considers the fullest realization to date of his artistic vision, he performs radical reworkings of mostly traditional folk songs with his frequent band, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Chris Vatalaro, along with saxophonist and label mate Sam Gendel, guitarist Bert Cools, bassist Ruth Goller, and Amidon’s wife, Beth Orton, who adds vocals on three songs.